


Your vines are wrapped so tightly around me I can't breathe

by sunflower123ink



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Flower Language, Hanahaki Disease, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied requited love, M/M, Mentions of Blood, Unrequited Love, i still suck at tagging, not too much though, the word is there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:28:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26187973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflower123ink/pseuds/sunflower123ink
Summary: You are lovely and monstrous and everything I hate and everything I obsess over. My feelings rise out of me in ocean waves of petals. Your ropes are tied around me and they're only vines so I should be able to break them but I can't. Gentle petals cover my eyes so I can't see the mirror but do I look pretty? Your illness infected me and twisted me around and around. Pollen coats my fingers the same way my blood did not too long ago.I can't breathe.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle
Comments: 7
Kudos: 19





	Your vines are wrapped so tightly around me I can't breathe

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! So I actually don't normally write super descriptive stuff like this and my other fic 'You're Dangerous. (But I love you for it.)' but I'm testing it out! This is also a little different formatting than the other stores on my page, a little blockier. I hope you enjoy this and check out the other stories I have on my page :) P.S I listed the meanings for all of the flowers as this uses flower language, in the ending Authors Note.  
> <3
> 
> Not beta'd  
> I do not own Harry Potter, its characters, its plot, or anything written by JKR.

You planted your roots within me like weeds that kept growing back. Except you are not a weed, you are a glorious garden. I say garden because it seems impossible to limit you to one single description, depiction. It _is_ impossible. You are colors of all kinds, petals of every texture. Even the poisonous ones. Really, you are rather acidic when I think about it. More toxic then you come across. Misleading. Sometimes it makes my heart ache, thinking of it. Of how I wished for you to be different. Most of the time the ache is accompanied by a burning in my lungs. I don't normally try and separate them, they are both pains in my chest for the same reason. It is hard to ignore the feeling when it makes flowers scrape their way out of me. I am well pass the stage of petals by now. Those lasted for a day, if that. They say pain seems to last lifetimes. Harsh wounds that last for only seconds feel like hours, it is the opposite, with this. I feel like even though it has been weeks since you started to destroy me, the terrifying beauty of my illness began and progressed in a day. I'm not sure which timeline is actually correct. I don't care either. I try not to think of you.

It is _impossible_

You consume every one of my thoughts with a burning determination, as though you were trying to spite me. Maybe you are, I wouldn't know. It means that all day, every second spent with your name ringing in my mind is a second spent cradling crushed petals. I've advanced to stems now, though. I didn't even know you could cough up flowers with stems. I suppose most people have had the surgery done by now. As soon as full flowers begin to come up, and if they don't... Then I guess they just didn't live long enough to explain that thorns were what was making them bleed. I can feel it. Vines twisting and growing, roots firmly attaching themselves to my heart. They are coiled tightly around my lungs, blooming _impossibly_ without anything we are taught a plant needs. I always thought you were the impossible, from the moment I first met you. I was so naive. To think that soon after it would hurt to inhale because of the constantly tightening of spirals around my lungs. Really, they are tightened around my heart. After all, that is what caused this. You would disagree.

You say the heart is not where love is.

You could and would argue this for hours on end and then hold a grudge about it for days. I learned this and though I argued with you, you would never change your mind. You say love is from the mind, even though people say it can't be, because 'rational' is not one of the words associated with love while it is consistently roped in with the head. People, really means me. I tell you love is not from the brain. You call me naive and say the heart is but an organ that can only beat and pump blood. That love is all chemicals, that it can be manufactured in labs, that it is false. You never understood how I could disagree so vehemently, why I disagreed so vehemently.

It is because it is _your_ thorns that are pricking me and making me bleed.

It is not a metaphor. They started at my heart, sharp as knives and yet somehow only small pointed stems. They pricked and pricked and pricked until they ate away at my rib cage, the way you so often do with my mind. Using your stupid games that I told you to stop playing so long ago. Just like the restricting garden in my lungs, you did not stop. In a way, you are the disease. You are the disease with every flower I cough up, so covered in blood sometimes I forget the color of them. Sometime after the last of my naivety that you oh so loved and despised had rot away, I realized that you simply are, a disease. Not just the one scraping my throat raw -though you are the reason for this one too- but something so entirely different. An infection seeping into me. So quickly I wonder sometimes if you'd injected me with it instead of the sickness itself simply leeching onto me. You are like a drug, almost. I know you would hate the comparison. You'd prefer to be a snake but, I just can't see it. 

If a snake bit me I would not approach it again.

However with you, I do. You encourage me to. You are addicting and maybe that's why, why, I feel a little sick pleasure, every time I hold a bloody petal. This disgusting, tiny, part of me, twisted just as tightly as the stems are around my lungs. It feels just a bit better every time I throw up. Every time I feel the telltale squeeze and I wonder if it's that small part of me that's so similar to you that you loved. That maybe it is glad that my infatuation is being shown. Maybe it thinks I deserve to be punished for it. Maybe it savors the horrifying way in which I have been made to love you.

I love you so much it hurts.

That phrase is always used so metaphorically, so tossed around, but I'm in _pain_ for you. I wonder what you'd say if you saw my flat. It is unrecognizable, even to me. Petals and flowers and _blood_ so much blood. I wonder if you'd be pleased to see the blood. There were times when your eyes flashed a color so similar to what still stains my fingertips even though they've been under the water for minuets now. I wonder if you'd be glad that your thorns are showing me how weak it is to love. Glad that you were able to wind your way around me, sunlight unneeded when you have my eyes, soil unnecessary when you have my body, water unwanted when you have my tears.  


I realize that my fingertips aren't actually still stained, the water was just so hot they had become red. 

My friends have stopped visiting. I made them. I could not stand to make bile rise in their throats the same way it does mine every time I see a flower. I try to escape you, every method there is in the books but you are everywhere. Your hands are forbidden imprints upon my body, somehow leaving marks across my rib cage as though you know what resides underneath the skin, what sits so neatly rooted into the marrow. I try to understand how, because you have never even touched me there. Ah, nightmares. Or dreams. I can't pick a name for them. Nasturtium's sat so preciously planted around you, inside you, I wonder how I did not see it before. Did my Coral Roses blind me so much? I wonder if it is Pine I see stuffed into your expensive boots. I had Pine once too. I imagine our plants were both for different reasons. I can't fathom how you can pity me when it is you who made my grass brown and shrivel. Is this not what you wanted? My Pine fell off of trees the moment I hiccupped the first full flower, the hope forgotten almost entirely. I can't tell if my straight rows of colors and words and meanings are blackening and crumbling because of the sap coming out of my lungs or the toxic illness that you are that intoxicates me. Maybe they're the same thing. 

I roll over from brushing fallen thorns off of me. Thinking about what could've happened only makes everything hurt even more. 

I can't tell who to blame. Me or you. Me for not seeing you as the most fatal pestilence I could ever allow myself to be infected with, or you. You, for everything you ever did and did not do.  
No matter what I pick, I will still hate myself for falling in love with you. I still don't know if my heart racing whenever you smiled was my love for you or your venom coursing through me.  
I doubt I ever will. 

I want to hate you but I love you and it won't stop. 

Though Forget-Me-Nots were not what sprouted from my lungs they were what I wish you would give me. I know how well you could whisper into my ear and tell me that you've planted Forget-Me-Nots into the cage protecting my oh so fragile heart (My heart covered in Asters) but I know they aren't there.

I used to be covered in Violets, purple complimenting my hair in ways I wished you would've noticed. Daisy's grew over my head in a natural flower crown, I wished harder than ever to cover them but you got there first. They had already wilted by the time I noticed your own flowers. Dandelions and Red Carnations that I wished to cover with Candy Tuft's, but your vines wouldn't let me. I only saw the vines after they had crawled into my mouth and rooted themselves into the only place I could breath. (Among the flowers you planted, I never did find Forget-Me-Nots.) I never found White Camellias even though you called me them all the time. Adorable I was, always. Red Camellias were never said nor grown, I suppose I did not have the right foundation for that. Ivy Sprig of white tendrils unfurled onto me unexpectedly. Just like you did. Sometimes, in between the waves of flowers I find it in me to _hate_ you. The way you were able to twine yourself and your poisons around me. No matter how many Lily-Of-The-Valley petals you bathe in, they will never soak into you. Instead Nerium Oleander's _are_ you. I forgot how dangerous they were when the smell was drowning me. The sweet scent of loveliness. I didn't even mind suffocating. They are considered one of the deadliest flowers on earth. And you slipped petals one by one straight into me. I am not going crazy, despite the lack of oxygen. I am aware there are no flowers around me other than the ones inside me. I am aware you are not a surface capable of housing plants, however considering that it is you and these blasted _flowers_ that are creating this mixture of sap and blood on my tongue then maybe it should be you and flowers simply as my explanation.

I find it in me to _hate_ you. It never stops the dizzy spells that attack me when I can no longer inhale enough oxygen. It does not prolong my time to live. I despise you. You have made me rotten and I know it's not just in the way my corpse cools. It is as I grapple for the kitchen counter and end up shattering a mug while I claw at my throat. Because I'm imagining it is you I'm clawing at. I don't remember where I was thinking of clawing only that I imagined the blood on the floor was yours and the color of my flowers didn't exist. You have turned me inside out and when I look in the mirror it is not the Petunia's and Roses creeping on my face that make me unrecognizable. It is whatever you have tainted me with.

I hate you and despise you and I wish to crumple and stomp and wilt all of the flowers that surround you because I know all of them mean _triumph,_ and _success,_ and _glory_ and a million of other words I can hate you for. The Lily's and Orange Blossoms that surround your face mean nothing when I can _see_ the Marigold and Monkshood peeking through. I could see them and the Orange Mock and the Begonias from the very beginning. Deceit and lies twirled so beautifully, I took the makeshift flowers and deposited them thoughtfully into my hair.

Orange Lily's appear around me but do not take away anything else. They could be an acknowledgment of my hatred for you or maybe a mockery. That no matter how much I want to rip your throat out I will not be able to and it is not because of my White Zinnias (You never had that in you, I know that now. No goodness was ever growing in you to begin with.) No it is because of the Red Roses, the Single Full Bloom Rose, the Coral Rose and the Lavender Rose and the _roses._

They stop me from hurting you even when you're tearing me apart.

My eyes shoot open one night, or they try to. I'm having trouble trying to pry my eyelids open when Daffodils have grown over them. My hands come up to tear them off and I realize I can't breath. My mouth is filled with the taste I have become so accustomed to. I take note of you sitting by the couch. I stopped sleeping in my bedroom when I ended up coming out to the kitchen anyway for a drink. Not that it helped. I wonder how long you had been sitting there and I dismiss asking you how you got in, because I can't speak anyway. I shoot up and rip the flowers out, over and over and over and over. My hands claw at my mouth and my fingertips keep coming back clutching deceivingly soft petals. Blood is leaking from somewhere and all I know is that it starts near my lungs. I'm panicking. The roots must be too, they are shifting in my body, I can feel them. They slither and coil and I wonder if you are like a snake after all because this feels like scales inside of me moving and if you are the disease then you are inside of me, sliding and making bile rise in my throat. You push me down and you are talking, I notice. Your words are so whispered and soft they feel just like the petals held in my trembling hands. 

I am surprised, in my last moments. You take my glasses off from where I must have fallen asleep with them on, that is not what I am surprised at. I am surprised to see Purple Hyacinths bloom under your eyes. My eyes widen as I take in the rapidly growing Cyclamens. More Purple Hyacinths are blooming between our intertwined fingers and I'm not even sure when you interlocked them. Primrose is suddenly sprouting behind your eyes and it is beautiful. Sweet Pea is everywhere, Yellow Tulips have taken over, regret and sorrow and emotions I never sought to see are rising like the morning sun. There are no declarations of love though sometimes I think I glimpse it, colors of petals that belong to flowers that could speak it. I know I should feel nothing but resentment towards you, but as I feel black spots dance in my vision, so different and contrasting to the copious amounts of colors I've had to see recently, I can't. I can only think of how beautiful you look. Colors I had come to despise look flawless on you, decorating your very being. I'm so very scared. At least, I was. But now I can't really feel anything. My last dwindling thought is wondering if you think me beautiful. 

Mouth frozen in a silent scream, only quiet because of the flowers curling so delicately over my pretty pink lips. The pretty flowers once again looking so innocent for things so malicious. Language only flowers understand is written in invisible ink across my skin, marking where vines and stems protruded instead of veins with a new word describing my feelings. I wonder if you want to slice me open. If you will once I'm dead. Cut right down the middle just to find the glimpse of white bone and see what you have truly done to me. Stare at the flowers once again frailly covering me, encasing themselves around me, outside me, and inside me. I wonder if you will stare at my hands and wonder where the stems that are growing under my nails lead. I wonder if all the blood will have already been coughed up by now. I wonder if you enjoy the look of my chest twitching as everything burns. I really didn't think this would feel so...so...cruel. I don't know what else I expected really. When my skin goes ice cold and my eyes drop close and glaze over, will I look as pretty as you imagined?

Every bit your rotten masterpiece?

A bouquet of withered flowers sprouting from my heart and blooming over my mouth.

When my vision goes black I miss the growing of Variegated Tulips. Beautiful eyes, they mean.

So tell me.

Is it everything you thought? Blood and petals surrounding me like a twisted sort of shrine.  
My eyes are closed now.

I imagine you'll open them.

Just so I look a bit more perfect.

Every bit, your twisted and suffocated masterpiece.

**Author's Note:**

> Heyo! I hoped you liked that! Please comment and give your feedback, I thrive off of others thoughts and don't be afraid to correct or criticize! Anyways, check out my page and leave a kudos! <3  
> Nasturtium: Conquest, Victory  
> Coral Rose: Desire  
> Pine: Pity, Hope (I intended for both meanings. Hope for Harry and pity for Tom)  
> Forget-Me-Not: True Love (In other context when giving one to someone it could be memories, but in this story...you know)  
> Aster: Symbol of Love, Daintiness (In this, I meant both meanings. That his heart is dainty and fragile, and a symbol of love. Especially because he thinks you can love with your heart and not your mind like Tom, and his heart ends up broken.)  
> Violets: Innocence, True-Ever Lasting Love  
> Daisy:Innocence, Loyal Love  
> Dandelions: Faithfulness (Depending on context, can mean happiness but I intended for the meaning to be faithfulness)  
> Red Carnations: Admiration (Can also mean 'My Heart Aches For You' but I intended for admiration which is what it's more known for)  
> Candy Tuft: Indifference  
> White Camellia: You're Adorable  
> Ivy Sprig of White Tendrils: Anxious to Please, Affection  
> Lily-Of-The-Valley: Sweetness, (there are four other meanings but I intended this one that is is it more known for)  
> Nerium Oleander: When I mentioned this one, I did not use it for the actual meaning, but because of the actual flower, which smells very nice but is poisonous.  
> Petunia: Resentment, Anger (Can also mean 'Your Presence Soothes Me' but I was intending for it's other two more common meanings)  
> Roses: When I mention Roses here, it is meaning the love, affection, respect, ect. that Harry feels for Tom alongside the Petunia's that mean resentment and anger. So no specific Rose or anything, I just meant a reference to all of the roses that meaning something similar)  
> Lily: When I mention them here, I reference all the Lily's that mean sweet, and kind.  
> Orange Blossoms: Innocence (there are two other meanings, this one is more common and it's what I meant)  
> Marigold: Cruelty (Can also mean Grief or Jealousy, more known for cruelty and that's what I meant)  
> Monkshood: Beware, A Deadly Foe Is Near  
> Orange Mock: Deceit  
> Begonia: Beware  
> Orange Lily: Hatred  
> White Zinnia: Goodness  
> Red Rose: Love (Can also mean respect, more commonly used for love and that's what I meant)  
> Single Full Bloom Rose: I Love You, I Still Love You  
> Lavender Rose: Enchantment  
> Coral Rose: Desire (I did already write this meaning but I'm going in order of how they're mentioned and this one was next)  
> Daffodils: Unrequited Love (This is the meaning I intended for, there are three others)  
> Purple Hyacinths: I Am Sorry, Please Forgive Me, Sorrow  
> Cyclamens:Resignation, Goodbye  
> Primrose: I Can't Live Without You, and when given during evening, can mean: Inconstancy, and I think both meanings work when it comes to love.  
> Sweet Pea: Goodbye, Departure, Thank You For A Lovely Time (Can also mean 'Blissful Pleasure')  
> Yellow Tulips: There's Sunshine In Your Smile  
> Variegated Tulips: Beautiful Eyes
> 
> And that's the list! I've always loved how intention has to be taken into account when it comes to flower language. Please let me know if this list is hard to understand or frustrating so I can change it and try to make it better! Love <3


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